A Meeting to Remember: A Side Story

Charles- well, Kareem, as he would always call himself- found it weird. Rather, he recalled an odd encounter.

Not so long ago, he met a certain young girl. She was a tiny little thing. Well, he too wasn't so big, but he hadn't been as little as she had been then. He was on his merry way right after succeeding an escape from his mentors' oily grasps. While the old men were definitely bright enough to contribute some of the most significant magical and political books in the Empire, he found them both dull and lacking as tutors.

''Sides, they were too fond of speaking about themselves that it would have been better if I wasn't there to steal their spotlight,' Kareem thought with a small snicker.

Anyway, the prince believed that it was rather odd that while he was striding through the Black Caves, he would find a doll-sized girl. What was even curioser to the young prince was the fact that she travelled about the musty streets with a confidence unlike any other of her age or more.

Kareem, with a growing interest, trailed after her with no ulterior motive behind his actions. However, he would soon realize that following her had made for a poor choice, especially because he had ultimately left the castle to flee from the stressful learning environment in the first place.

More than just a few times, he would find his heart beating all too fast. One moment, he thought the tiny thing wouldn't notice the manhole right in front of her, and when he was just about to jump right in and save her from falling down through it, she simply hopped over it like it was perfectly normal. Another time, she passed through a stall selling poisonous wares, and he had almost shouted out when he saw her handling a vial of some nefarious mixture as though she was about to take a sip from it. When she quietly returned the vial onto the table, Kareem could almost swear he heard her mumble in praise, "Nice work on the bottle."

However, only a few moments later, when Kareem already had a thin layer of cold sweat lining his temples, the tiny girl seemed to have finally ran out of luck.

'Ah, finally, I could save her!' he had thought.

Although he did indeed save her, he thought that it was quite anticlimactic. The girl only became more peculiar up close. She was bundled up in a simple cloak, and while there was very little he could see beneath her hood, he could notice the soft, brown curls that littered around her like a halo. And while Kareem had no doubt she would look like an angel underneath her cloak, he had been simply astounded by the manner of her speech and her vibrant personality.

Pray tell, he thought, which child would go ahead and utter, "Solus bless my Papa's tiny Pudenda...", with much refined grace and meaning? And when he had loftily told her about his brave escape, she had instead treated him like he was a slave or a mere runner boy. In the end, in a state of utter frustration and hurt pride, he decided to tease her.

He would guide her to the exit, he said, but only if she could pay the price.

Of course, as a crown prince, Kareem would never do that, but somehow he found himself feeling mischievous in front of the girl, who was, to him, a bundle of utter confidence and sarcasm. When he saw how the girl's face, originally lit up in expectation, suddenly blur out into a dismissive demeanor, he found that he had regained some of the energy he had lost from following her around.

However, it wasn't even long before his demeanor was utterly broken by her again.

They had found a common scene, a noisy occurrence that most people would walk past through, paying little mind to it. A woman had been dragged out by a group of men, harking about a debt that has yet to be paid. In Kareem's mind, it was only right to pay back what a person owes. When a contract has been signed, the parties should always follow through.

So, he was surprised at how the girl acted. Like a bunny, she stood there in fright, her body noticeably shaking. He came forward, thinking that she was a sheltered child, terrified of a mildly violent scene.

But he was wrong.

She was calm.

Within her midnight blue eyes, a deep emotion swirled. Her body shook not in fear, but in anger. No, not anger... Rage.

"Boy, didn't you say the youth are discriminated upon?" she had asked him seriously, to which he had nodded at slowly, recalling their past conversations. But then she posed on him a question that sounded odd to his ears, "Then what do you think of the women?"

'Women?' he had repeated in his mind. 'What of women?'

"... I will soon grow to become one. What do you think about the scene we just saw?"

When she asked that, Kareem couldn't bear to look away from her deep eyes- eyes that showed a profoundness he barely saw in anyone; eyes that he would often see in his father's wizened face. In front of him, he realized, was a tiny girl with a gaze of an emperor.

Suddenly, he grew nervous. It had suddenly felt like he was standing in front of his father, the royal hall echoing the words he would declare, the questions he asked ringing in his own ears. His mind grew blank, as it almost always did when he was in the emperor's presence, and in that state, he managed to spout out an answer. Even then, he didn't remember what he had even said.

Apparently, it wasn't a notable answer because the girl looked at him with a look of sad disappointment before walking away. He watched as her back grew smaller to his eyes...

'No... No!' he had thought, and in a moment of panic, made for a grab at her tiny arm.

She had looked at him in shock, and then... expectation.

The prince blubbered his way through it, asking rather than saying, "Then... Were those men bad men? Were they going to hurt the woman?"

Then came the rain. It seemed as though the girl had been waiting for his words, which he had spoken without much care. However, her words, rather than his flimsy guesses, stung harshly and became embedded deeply in his mind.

"Those were very bad men," she declared.

Right, he thought, but what were the evidence of this?

"Why should the sister shoulder the debts of her still living brother with her own body? It isn't right!"

If it isn't right, he thought, then in what way... Kareem had always thought that it was only right for a sister to help out her own brother, but... indeed, in a contract, the parties hold the signatures of the lender and the debtor, and the sister should have had no connection to it, not unless the brother was dead and she was the only relative alive...

"She can work hard for the money, but she probably wasn't even given enough time. Why? Why should the women be treated so badly?!"

By then, Kareem's mind was ridden by tumultuous waves, as though a sea storm was going through it. And this storm was cause by this one sniffling and huffing girl.

Alas, she had been too loud, much like the storm her words had brought into life inside his little head. So, he had picked her up after a hasty apology, and brought them to a hiding spot he had found months prior. He only belatedly realized how closely he had brought them to the exit, and how short his time with her would be because of this.

So, he had to ask her. "What's your name?"

"Elle," she had said with a wondrously cute sniffle.

And although he had wanted nothing but to tell her the truth, he had to resort to a false introduction. Sneak...

He was a prince, but he was forced to sneak and tip toe around this little girl. She had ideas so awesome to his sheltered ears, and not for the first time that day, he felt a glowing respect for her. And he wanted to know more. He wanted to hear more from her miraculous lips.

Alas, he couldn't just sneak her off for himself.

So, he led her out of the Dark Caves and saw her off, watching as her hood flew off her head as she ran towards a tall woman, probably her nanny. He laughed at how her dark golden curls bounced around her, very much like a halo as he had thought of them during his first impression. When she had looked back to search for him, her distraught face still holding a trace of her ecstasy, he could only force himself to stay hidden. He didn't want to be too attached to her, a little lady of a foreign accent.

'Let this be a common event,' he had thought, 'where a woman gets off from paying her debt simply because her smile was enough as payment... and she would go on to happily live her life, all thoughts of the debt long erased from her pretty head.'

But he would always remember her. And years later, her soft hair and midnight blue eyes still haunted his mind. In the academe, her short, yet powerful words have been imprinted so deeply into him that his scholastic works almost always held a female leaning. Once, a tutor of his, a replacement one, had read through one of his essays, and he could still remember the surprise on the tutor's face.

The man asked him if he had read texts from this person or from this person, but to all of which he had said no. So, the tutor had asked him directly, "Why do you give so much importance to the perspective of a woman?"

And although Kareem had wanted to tell him of the story of Elle, the tiny foreigner that flew into the Empire's Dark Caves... he shouldn't.

So, he only shrugged, saying, "A chance encounter brought me to enlightenment", as though he was one of those wise philosophers from the ancient texts.

The tutor had laughed at his words, yet his eyes and his smile was friendly.

When Kareem saw how the tutor hadn't chided him, and how the man had not once mentioned the word, Temptress, he somehow saw hope in the future yet, and somehow, that wasn't so weird at all.